A 45-second play with no words and more swearing than you'd hear from troopers on the march - all part of Northern Stage's challenging new season of plays, as David Whetstone explains.

Never known for lacking in ambition, Northern Stage's artistic director, Alan Lyddiard, has devised another mountain for his company to climb.

Play Boys is an autumn season dedicated to the work of three of the 20th Century's most influential playwrights - David Mamet, an American, Samuel Beckett, an Irishman, and Harold Pinter, an Englishman.

It will involve another major reconstruction of the Playhouse auditorium, which is to be divided into two spaces to accommodate the Mamet plays Glengarry Glen Ross and Edmond.

The Gulbenkian is getting a similar makeover to accommodate The Dumb Waiter and The Collection, by Pinter, and a Beckett triple bill - Play, Not I and Breath.

As the Royal Shakespeare Company takes over the venue days after Play Boys takes its final applause, you could say we are in for an autumn of heavyweight drama at the Newcastle theatre complex.

But can you really class Beckett's wordless, 45-second play Breath, which is just that, a simple inhalation and exhalation of air, as heavyweight? If it is, then it's only because, inevitably, it will make you think. Why did he do it? And, strictly speaking, is a play consisting only of stage directions really a play?

The packaging up of these three legendary literary figures should make the season attractive to students of the theatre while the Mamet pieces are likely to have a wider, commercial appeal, although, due to some rich language, the season is targeted at people aged 16 and over.

Glengarry Glen Ross, capturing the seething rivalries, anxieties and frustrations in an American real estate office, was made into a successful film starring Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino and Kevin Spacey.

Edmond is likened by Northern Stage spokesman Chris Collett to the Michael Douglas film Falling Down, in which a respectable man gets locked into a descending spiral of violence and depravity after getting stuck in a traffic jam - only the Mamet play, he says, plumbs even greater depths.

Edmond - to be played by Alex Elliott, who was Alex in the Northern Stage revival of A Clockwork Orange - is a New York businessman who hits the skids in dramatic fashion after visiting a fortune teller.

Alan Lyddiard, who directed A Clockwork Orange and the recent 1984, is to take charge of this production, no doubt imbuing it with the same uncompromising, edgy qualities for which he has become known.

Explaining the Play Boys season, he says: "We have done an awful lot of adaptations of novels, short stories and poems and I thought the time was ripe for a play or two."

Lyddiard chose Beckett, Mamet and Pinter not only because they were generally influential, but because they also influenced each other. While Beckett is Pinter's main inspiration, Pinter is Mamet's. Glengarry Glen Ross is dedicated to Harold Pinter. "There is a definite relationship between them," says the Northern Stage boss. While Play Boys may have been welcomed by the ensemble generally, it hardly presents the jolliest opportunities for its female members, who tend to be cast as victims and prostitutes in this testosterone-fuelled season (Mamet, in particular, is known as a blokes' kind of writer).

"I think they're fine about it," says Lyddiard of his actresses. "I think they know the style of the work I favour and this is up front, in-your-face sort of stuff essentially.

The most notable female role falls to Jane Arnfield, a Northern Stage favourite. She - or rather her mouth - is to star in Beckett's Not I, a monologue in which only the speaker's lips and teeth appear. But that most masculine of plays, Glengarry Glen Ross, is to be directed by Chicago theatre director Karen Kessler, working in Britain for the first time.